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Likelihood to Recommend

Apache Solr

Solr spins up nicely and works effectively for small enterprise environments providing helpful mechanisms for fuzzy searches and facetted searching. For larger enterprises with complex business solutions you'll find the need to hire an expert Solr engineer to optimize the powerful platform to your needs.Internationalization is tricky with Solr and many hosting solutions may limit you to a latin character set.

It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.

There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.

The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.

Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"

It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

Alternatives Considered

Between Solr and ElasticSearch, there is a constant struggle to pick the best one. ElasticSearch is part of ELK and ties in well with LogStash and Kibana which makes it great for logs and big data stuff. Add some logs and see which works best for your particular access methods and queries. They are very similar but elasticsearch is better for REST access.